Revival of the play first staged at the Théâtre de
Chaillot, Paris, in 2009
Seen at the Amandiers theatre, Nanterre, on 5 November
2014
Vincent Macaigne likes to compare his plays to a house
on fire; he wants to make his audiences feel as if they were at once outside
the house - and inside it. In a way, what he aims to achieve is an out of body
experience familiar to epileptics such as the protagonist of this revival of
Macaigne’s play based on Dostoyevsky’s The
Idiot. If not provoking an epileptic fit, the show is certainly doing
everything to put the viewers in an altered state of consciousness, to make us
more open to the outrage and excesses of the play, more compassionate to the
plight of its characters and ultimately more entertained. There is something of
a ritual in the way the audience is carefully manipulated, subjugated and in
the end liberated through the “sacrifice” of the final scene (having said that,
several people did leave at the beginning of the first act). The preparation
begins in the foyer with the blaring pop music (with such hits from the
director’s and the actors’ childhood as Europe’s “Final countdown”; earplugs
are provided). We enter the auditorium and our senses are assaulted once again:
in the dark room trance music mixed with some cheesy pop and the hymn of USSR
is blaring, balloons are flying, some of the cast are already on stage and inviting
the spectators to join in the party. This is a nightclub where Nastassia
Filippovna’s birthday is about to be celebrated. Apparently, in the earlier
performances of the play in Paris’s Théâtre de la Ville you could get free beer
if you came up on stage. This goes on for a good fifteen minutes while the
“guests” arrive and look for their seats in the dark before the action begins
in earnest.
In Macaigne’s plays, actors yell so much that yelling has
become the director’s signature technique. Where in classical theatre it is
used only occasionally (and not always effectively) to express extreme emotion,
in the French director’s plays the actors yell constantly, and when they don’t,
they shout in a megaphone. Macaigne claims that it is what the intensity and
violence of the action requires, and anyone experiencing such strong emotions
as the characters in his plays do would only be expected to scream, unable to
contain their suffering and desperate to be heard. Moreover, in the case of
Dostoyevsky’s novel, many scenes are indeed accompanied by side notes
indicating that the characters did shout almost all of their lines. But most
importantly, I believe, in Macaigne’s theatre yelling serves to both reflect
and produce the effect of manipulation, to maintain the spectator in a state
which is radically different from his usual disposition, to create an ultimate
effect of defamiliarisation. It is a mark of theatricality in the same way
masks worn by actors in Ancient Greece were. It is possible that this is why,
stripped of all their theatrical contexts, scenes from ‘L’Idiot’ have none of
the same effect on video. There is talk of a publication of the text of
Macaigne’s version but I am wondering if the text will have lost most of its
intensity and appeal on the printed page.
In the same way as it addresses the immediacy of
emotion, Macaigne’s theatre unapologetically places itself in the here and now
of the French culture and refuses to reproduce obsolete patterns. The French
cultural policies are about the preservation of the “national cultural
heritage”, and Macaigne has always had an issue with this. A character in
‘L’idiot’ makes a seemingly random remark on the topic, but viewed in the
larger context of the director’s work it makes perfect sense. For Macaigne,
preserving the ‘patrimoine national’ serves no purpose; an artist should be
brave enough to confront classical texts, to make them relevant to the present
day, the political and social context as well as contemporary sensibilities.
Arguably, he has not as yet confronted the French classics, but in his
‘L’Idiot’ and in his notorious version of Shakespear’s Hamlet (‘Au moins j’aurai laissé un beau cadavre’, 2011) he is tackling
classical texts which have become a part of the cultural imagination in the
Western world. Macaigne says that the first version of ‘L’idiot’ (2009) was a
response to the rage and despair he, along with many of his compatriots, felt
during the Sarcozy years, and the revival of the play reflects the disillusionment
that followed the change in government. Thus, at the opening of the second part
of the play, we see the Sarcozy/Hollande presidential debate on the three
tv-screens on the stage. But even more importantly, for Macaigne, Dostoyevsky’s
mammoth novel captures an image of the time of uncertainty and a painful yet
hopeful anticipation that is so like our own. The new world of capitalism
erupted in the second half of the 19th century in Europe, and today
we are still dealing with the massive advantages and catastrophic consequences
that it brought with it. It is therefore not accidental that Lebedev, a
relatively minor character in the novel, becomes such an important presence in
the play. Indeed Lebedev, who likes to interpret the Apocalypse in his spare
time, likes to say that the great star that fell on Earth in the Book of
Revelation, is the railway network that has entangled Russia and the world, the
ominous symbol of progress. This combination of optimism and anticipation of a
disaster is rendered in the structure of the play with its two parts, the first
representing hope, the second despair (‘la fête est finie’).
It is clear that the yelling, the megaphones, the
ingenious use of props and scenography, massive amounts of fake blood, foam,
glitter and mud are there to emphasize the raw intensity of the emotion and to
showcase Dostoyevsky/Macaigne’s text. In fact, even though the novel has been
thoroughly reworked and stripped of a number of storylines to preserve the bare
minimum, Dostoyevsky’s great monologues are given a lot of space, often placed
outside of their original context or given to another character in line with
the particular logic of the play. The Russian author’s obsession with creating
meaning not from descriptions of internal states and personal histories of the
characters but from their interactions with each other - the famous ‘scandals’
- finds its faithful expression in the play’s baroque excesses. Dostoyevsky’s
writing is characterised by an ironic detachment and the so-called ‘polyphony’
which means that each monologue is pronounced with an opponent in mind, and is
always, in fact, a dialogue. This awareness of the constant presence of an
antagonist and the need to preserve meaning seems to be the driving force of
the play. The main opponent here, not surprisingly, is boredom and the
perceived staleness of the classical text. The play is constantly one step
ahead of the viewers, anticipating and controlling their reactions, keeping them
entertained. In one of the earlier scenes, Aglaya delivers a monologue which
runs just a little too long but, just before leaving the stage, she turns to
the audience and declares: “Have I bored you? I shall be leaving now.” Two of
the most tragic figures of the novel, prince Myshkin and Ippolyte, are turned
into a clown and a (rather comic) zombie respectively, which in no way
diminishes the power of their suffering and raises their performances to a new
level of tragedy. In a true carnivalesque fashion, elevation is achieved
through debasement.
Dostoyevsky’s novel is constantly keeping the readers
on their toes: “What is going to happen next?” “Is he going to kill himself?”
“Is he finally going to be happy with this woman?” are some of the questions
that make you read on. In Macaigne’s play, this effect is first and foremost
achieved by the scenography, the use of props and costumes. I kept gasping
every few minutes unable to believe the new trick they have come up with to
surprise the audience but also to punctuate the important points in the
development of the plot. In a perverse interpretation of Chekhov’s famous maxim
(‘If you say in the first
chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third
chapter it absolutely must go off’) many scenes are prepared beforehand. In the
first act, a Mickey Mouse balloon appears on stage to highlight the festive
nature of the gathering. When Rogozhin arrives at the end of the party, he
takes his anger with Ganya Ivolgin who is about to marry his beloved out on the
balloon – and there is carnage. Similarly, Nastassia Filippovna’s death is
foreshadowed by the appearance on stage of a giant knife sharpener. Props are
also used to express emotions while at the same time producing a comic effect.
For example, at the beginning of the second act Rogozhin pronounces a long
speech in front of Nastassia Filippovna while holding a bunch of sunflowers. So
expressive are his movements that by the end of the – rather long – monologue the
flowers in his hand are beaten into mulch. And let’s not forget the play’s
old-fashioned raisonneur Lebedev who first appears on stage in a giant rabbit
costume (with an open back) and spends the rest of the play stark naked.
Even though the play dedicates quite a lot of
attention to the relationship between Myshkin and Rogozhin (the light and dark
side of man in Dostoyevsky’s novel) somehow I felt that this particular
plotline, effectively the real love story of the novel, has not been
sufficiently explored. But this again may be part of the director’s strategy of
avoiding the classical clichés and controlling (even if at the cost of
disappointing) the audience’s expectations. The famous scene at the end of the
novel where Rogozhin and Myshkin spend the night on the bed with Nastassia
Filippovna’s body is replaced in the play by a different scene, possibly more
effective in this context, a scene which could be interpreted as a sacrifice. Another
famous image from the novel, the burning of Rogozhin’s money at the end of
Nastassia Filippovna’s party is similarly displaced. In the play, even if the
burning does happen, it is rather anticlimactic, as if it were an afterthought
and not the focus of the evening.
On the whole,
‘L’idiot’ with all its artifice and irreverence was a very satisfying, even
compulsive experience which left me feeling closer to the spirit - and the
letter - of Dostoyevsky’s novel and reminded me why we still should be reading
it today. I only hope the two French ladies whom I overheard during interval
saying that they’d never read the book because it is so long and boring and
basically ‘intellectual puke’ (‘du vomi intellectuel’) will have changed their
minds. And I am looking forward to Macaigne’s new endeavours, hopefully not
more of same but something yet bigger, more tragic and more
